I bought a Kindle copy of Anne Applebaum’s book, “Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World”, expecting to find verifiable facts about such autocrats/dictators as Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. Instead I got a polemic in the style of Donald Trump with a mishmash of assertions of questionable quality.

I first visited Russia in 1991 and on-and-off spent about 15 years there until I finally left in October 2022 – ie eight months after the invasion of Ukraine — because the Indian government asked me to speak at an in-house conference in New Delhi on Russia-China relations.

The first few pages of Applebaum’s book express general sentiments about autocracies which I agree with, and I agree with the overall theme about the relationship of such people with enablers in democracies that assist their survival. But it was not long before I ran into a Trump-like distortion of the reality that I experienced as an analyst talking to policy makers and business managers in Moscow and the Russian Far East in the 1990s.

Applebaum writes that Russian “reformers believed that deep and rapid engagement with the outside world would help them break up the old, dysfunctional system of central planning and create a new political as well as new economic order. ‘I was absolutely sure that we will succeed’, said Yegor Gaidar, the Russian economist who promoted the policy of ‘shock therapy’. ‘I was absolutely sure that there is no other way, and absolutely sure that a delay is suicidal for the country.’”

Applebaum then immediately writes: “But others had different plans. Among them was Vladimir Putin.” She approvingly quotes Karen Dawisha (author of “Putin’s Klepocracy: Who Owns Russia”, 2015) saying many “mistakenly” described Russia in the 1990s as an “inchoate democratic system being pulled down by history, accidental autocrats, popular inertia, bureaucratic incompetence, or poor Western advice”.

In fact, in my experience these words are very accurate and not mistaken, and I first wrote about this after my second visit to Russia in 1992. See: https://russianeconomicreform.ru/

But Applebaum quotes Dawisha as saying that “the real story” was very different: “From the beginning, Putin and his circle sought to create an authoritarian regime ruled by a close-knit cabal ..…who used democracy for decoration rather than direction.”

Appelbaum and Dawisha seem to believe that Gaidar’s reforms failed because of a conspiracy involving Putin rather than the more obvious fact that they were the wrong solution to an admittedly difficult problem.

Appelbaum writes that “the state that finally emerged in the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century was a full-blown autocratic kleptocracy, a mafia state built and managed entirely for the purpose of enriching its leaders.” “This project was launched much earlier than most understood. The first glimpse of the idea probably emerged in the Dresden headquarters of the KGB, where Putin was stationed in the 1980s and where KGB and Stasi teams were already building their networks of spies, safe houses, and secret bank accounts.”

From this moment I was unsure how to take Applebaum’s myriad assertions about other autocrats. I suspect that many are true – in the same way that Donald Trump generally manages to get a certain truth in many of his claims.

Appelbaum also writes about a dinner in Munich in February 2023 in which a European diplomat returned from Africa expressed surprise that some students repeated Russian claims that “blamed NATO for the invasion” of Ukraine. Once again Appelbaum reveals her limitations as an analyst and lack of in-depth Russian experience. I wrote and spoke about US proposals for a National Missile Defence (NMD) system in 2001 and said: “Many Russians see NATO expansion as aimed at Russia (the Poles and Baltic countries certainly see it this way) despite NATO denials. I marvel at the words of George Robertson, Secretary-General of NATO, when he says that NATO enlargement to possibly include countries of the former USSR carries no threat to Russia and that NATO’s enlargement follows precisely the post-Cold War logic.” See: https://www.jeffschubert.com/us-missile-defence/

Applebaum’s book is probably a thrilling read for people who want to occupy time at airports, but should not be relied upon for understanding “autocracy” in any detail — and certainly not for understanding Russia!